Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Season Six!

As a slave to ritual, I tend to spend my summers in the grip of a prolonged malaise. While others are running and playing and finding ways to soak up vitamin D, I shutter myself in with a steady diet of Donettes, strawberry milk and internet Scrabble. With the pallor and gait of the walking dead, I shuffle back and forth between computer and fridge. Weight is added. Kidneys deteriorate. My sometimes-pregnant wife rebuffs any amorous advance in unqualified disgust.

Whence come these deep depressions? The source of my funk is easy to explain.

A typical day at Casa McGraw begins with me brewing fresh coffee and bolting straight to my MacBook. Most any time of the year I am at this glorious moment treated to a house flooded by the new rising sun and the latest few panels of our official comic strip, Welcome to Falling Rock National Park. Packed with wholesome goodness, four anthropomorphic animals and one fetching park ranger, Falling Rock, not unlike chocolate cereal, has everything a body needs.

But in the forsaken months of summer, Falling Rock goes on hiatus. I, slumming for humor elsewhere, anywhere, plunge into melancholia. I'm sure my coworkers are aware that something is off during that forlorn stretch between May and August, when a typical morning exchange goes something like this:

Coworker:G'morning!

Me: Fuck your mother.

This summer was no different, except that, at one point, my paucity of morning humor was coupled with a solid month of crippling heat. Just imagine the renewal I felt when Falling Rock opened its sixth season last week.

Exhibit #356 - Kid Shay wants a piece of Lincoln

Boy did it feel good to dust myself off. By Wednesday, I was feeling lean and mean--quite like my old self.

And the comics? Artist and partner blogger Kid Shay continues to innovate, as those of you familiar with the strip are sure to notice. Never one to sit on his laurels, the Kid is pushing his skills to the very brink by using a brush as his new inking tool. The early returns are in, and let me tell you, the fictional southwest has never looked better. Neither has my comic crush, Ranger Dee.

And for you McBoners who are late to the party, if you haven't yet made a visit to the desert park, now's the time for your first ramble! A warning to you, though: this is the stuff of addiction. Beware the long, lonely summer when Kid Shay packs up his pens, gasses up and hits the road.

McBone List of Boycotted Substances

The Legend of Stabbone and McGraw

In 1967 the world's most powerful criminal super-genius, Stabbone, stole ten trillion dollars worth of gold boullion. Police, baffled as to the whereabouts of Stabbone's purported impenetrable underground lair, called on top investigator Rock McGraw to crack the case. Working tirelessly day after day, McGraw eventually tracked Stabbone to an abandoned latex mask factory. While McGraw radioed the boys for backup, Stabbone made his daring escape. In the chaos that ensued, both disappeared. Thirty years later, the case of Stabbone and McGraw remains a mystery, though some say that McGraw remains undercover, in relentless pursuit of his evil arch-nemesis.